Fisheries, Narrandera

If the past is another country, what do we say

about this shadowed present? Someone has

purchased new multi-focal lenses, tinted,

in bright-red frames with stretched stiletto temples.

Now the paddock’s glossed with spring green

empty of profane drovers, grimy sheep, mournful cattle

and the choking cheerfulness of colonialism.

Thin eucalypt saplings cluster, almost Scandinavian, against

centenarian, widow-making river-gums.

Wiradjuri glide and flutter beyond imagined fires,

roast kangaroo, boiled billies, damper cooked in cast iron

but we still can’t feel the dancers or their songs

even when we run fingers over the rusted duco

of a burnt-out, once bronze, Commodore.

Millennial

Two dark centuries. The world is a rusting car wreck.

Progress racier than race.

Darkness visible beneath a yellow box log.

Unsee this pelican’s wing folding in the lagoon.

Ending the Long Paddock: ZannyBeg’s ‘The Bullwhip Effect’

She signifies death, however you interpret:

the empty saleyards, the absent, blue-eyed cattle,

the writhen fish corpse, fly-road haunch,

cauliflower- cabbage- cow-skull, still-life stilled

by our Lady of the Bull-Whip in pristine blouse,

blue jeans and polished brown boots,

fondling the whip’s tip, steel eyes mesmerise,

cracking two green bottles falling from the wall.

Her funereal walk, intense camera-gaze (and music, off)

make her seem for a moment a Country Road Kali

the illusion of many arms bringing scourge, not blessings:

a symphony of silent suffering.

In the end it’s economics: we just don’t know

if her garland of skulls and her dance will suffice.

Forgetting Shit

Yeah, it’s the thing I hate most about getting old, said Errol

at last Friday’s Art Gallery opening of David Green’s retrospective –

itself a conjuring of forgottens, a stitching of mementoes,

a scrabbling swirl of deaths/dyings –

But Errol had a point: words, things, people, memories

keep going out of my mind – my ‘Circus Animals’ Desertion’:

I forget the familiar, the weird, the important, the trivial –

It feels as though life is letting go of me –

like I’m being slowly discarded, uncivilised – my thoughts like after-love-tissues

scattered along the Olympic Way.

You can see it in his paintings – they start out as almost primitive landscapes –

ethereal, evanescent, barely there – naked eucalypt torsos,

suggestive ridges and clefts … but supine, unfuckable …

Then he conjures/inscribes/filigrees –

mythologies, calligraphic flourishes,

ancient and arcane scripts, sketchbook doodles of still lifes, nudes, riddles …

the canvas is a mosaic of reclaimed shards

re-remembering …

I was thinking about this in Monday night’s baroque concert:

Latitude 37 presenting Orpheus’ Lyre:

extracts from this earliest, still surviving opera – Monteverdi, 1607.

The seven musicians twist harmony and melody into new warps and wefts –

harpsichord, viola da gamba and the O so deep throat of the theorbo –

going down, down – stretching to Hades

as the bass baritone takes us to the underworld of death and forgetting

wrenching his mouth and vocal chords into grotesque but fascinating ornamentation

as he sorrows for what is lost and demands Hell give up its treasures.

He and we are Orpheus, with lute. We ‘tame all of Nature’ –

and the demigod Charon, the boatman ferrying souls across the River Styx –

searching for our Euridyce …

… the good shit that makes life wonderful but now belongs – partly –

to another world. We want her back …

We are all anal retentives –

But in another mythology, she’s chosen to seduce or be seduced by Pluto,

fondling the pink pomegranate seeds with her tongue …

How do we cope with loss of beauty, pleasure, capacity?

We don’t want to lose that shit …

Let’s turn this dansemacarbre

this shitty polka

this excremental foxtrot

into … ragtime, tango, tarantella!